Make cheap international calls from your computer or just keep in contact with your business partners

The other day we were looking through our phone records and realised that just to own a business phone can cost over £400 a year, and that’s before we start to make international calls. Indeed, £400/year is regarded as small fry for BT and often doesn’t get your business on to their plans, which save you money when you start making international calls.

What’s the solution? One answer is Skype. This is VOIP technology that’s been around for a few years now and enables you to make very cheap international calls using your broadband. You don’t need ultra-fast broadband to make audio-only calls, either. Better still, some Skype calls can be better quality that some regular international calls, between certain countries.

Skype isn’t just limited to cheap audio calls. If you have faster broadband, you can use it to have a video conference between one or more people. Idea if you plan on bringing together multiple people from various territories, during a working day when phone costs are at their highest.

We use Skype to keep in contact with our international partners. We can use the technology to chat with these partners, through typing messages like you would if you were using Messenger. Anyone with a Skype account can be brought in to a conference where everyone can contribute and swap files.

This is Skype for Windows Phone v2.9 with these changes:

- People List Filter. Added a filter so you can see either all your contacts, just Skype contacts, or only available contacts.
- Home Screen. The Skype home screen has been improved so that users can now pivot through app functions.

Verdict:

Business application that enables you to keep in contact with international partners, make cheap calls and much more. Excellent tool, let down but the inconsistency in development between different operating systems.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI